Personality Disorders Awareness Network (PDAN)

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Personality Disorders Awareness Network (PDAN)

PDAN's goals are to increase awareness of personality disorders, alleviate the impact on families, an PDAN is a volunteer-managed community.
(2048)

Personality Disorders Awareness Network (PDAN) promotes a receptive, authentic and civil atmosphere for comments and users. Empathic and in-depth discussions and debates are encouraged to learn and express mutual support for fellow readers and contributors. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to voice their opinion regardless of identity, politics, ideology, religion or agreement with other community members, the author of the post or staff members as long as those opinions are respectful and constructively add to the conversation. PDAN prides itself in providing information with a great diversity of content styles while we pay particular attention to the way the content is expressed. We summarize this by saying:

"Our key communication challenges are not so much in WHAT we say, but HOW we say it." PDAN IS AN INFORMATION CHANNEL, and NOT A SUPPORT GROUP:
PDAN's pages are information and discussion channels, and not support groups. PDAN is about awareness and prevention of personality disorders. Many people in our audience are family members of people with personality disorders, and therefore they may have a very different perspective on these mental conditions than those who actually suffer from them. PDAN sometimes share content and allows comments that some people may find disturbing. If you do, please mention it to us by contacting our pages. PDAN staff will then look at the comments you find disturbing. We appreciate your help in improving our pages. PDAN may not necessarily change every comment that people report as disturbing. People who are unable to see the viewpoint of family members, should look for support groups, at least as a complement of using PDAN’s pages. The same applies for family members. PDAN will sometime empathize with people who have personality disorders in ways that family members could find hard to understand. PDAN aims to create an atmosphere of radical acceptance and validation, which are two qualities we encourage you to practice personally. If you feel you need a support group for borderline personality disorder, we recommend groups such as GroupBPD https://www.facebook.com/groups/groupbpd
or other pages such as Borderline Personality Disorder Community https://www.facebook.com/borderline.personality.disorder.community
or BPD Pieces of Me https://www.facebook.com/piecesofme2/

There are 10 defined types of Personality Disorders grouped into three clusters, and a couple of other general types of PDs. Cluster A (odd or eccentric disorders)
- Paranoid personality disorder: characterized by a pattern of irrational suspicion and mistrust of others, interpreting motivations as malevolent.
- Schizoid personality disorder: lack of interest and detachment from social relationships, apathy, and restricted emotional expression.
- Schizotypal personality disorder: a pattern of extreme discomfort interacting socially, and distorted cognitions and perceptions. Cluster B (dramatic, emotional or erratic disorders)
- Antisocial personality disorder: a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, lack of empathy, bloated self-image, manipulative and impulsive behavior.
- Borderline personality disorder: pervasive pattern of instability in relationships, self-image, identity, behavior and affects often leading to self-harm and impulsivity.
- Histrionic personality disorder: pervasive pattern of attention-seeking behavior and excessive emotions.
- Narcissistic personality disorder: a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. Cluster C (anxious or fearful disorders)
- Avoidant personality disorder: pervasive feelings of social inhibition and inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation.
- Dependent personality disorder: pervasive psychological need to be cared for by other people.
- Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: characterized by rigid conformity to rules, perfectionism, and control to the point of satisfaction and exclusion of leisurely activities and friendships (not the same as and quite different from obsessive-compulsive disorder). Other personality disorders (personality disturbance due to the direct effects of a medical condition.)
- Other specified personality disorder – symptoms characteristic of a personality disorder but fails to meet the criteria for a specific disorder, with the reason given.
- Personality disorder not otherwise specified

For information on personality disorders, please see: http://www.pdan.org/what-are-personality-disorders/
or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorders

For recent medical information, please see the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM5)
www.dsm5.org
or World Health Organization International Classification of Diseases, version 10 (WHO-ICD 10) http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2015/en #/F60

12/18/2025

12/14/2025

""My parents beat me as a child and I am not traumatized," said the man whose ex-partner reported him for physical violence.

"When I was a child they left me crying alone until I fell asleep and it was so bad I did not go out," said the man who spends long hours in social networks, affecting his sleep.

"They punished me as a child and I'm fine," said the man who, every time he makes a mistake, says to himself words of contempt, as a form of self-punishment.

"As a child, they put a heavy hand on me and I suffer from a trauma called 'education'," said the woman who still does not understand why all of her partners end up being aggressive.

"When I became capricious as a child, my father locked me in a room alone to learn and today I appreciate it," said the woman who has suffered anxiety attacks and can not explain why she is so afraid of being locked in small spaces .

"My parents told me they were going to leave me alone or give me to a stranger when I did my tantrums and I do not have traumas," said the woman who has prayed for love and has forgiven repeated infidelities so as not to feel abandoned

"My parents controlled me with just the look and see how well I came out," said the woman who can not maintain eye contact with figures of 'authority' without feeling intimidated.

"As a child, I got even with the iron cable and today I am a good man, even professional," said the man his neighbors have accused the police for drunk hitting objects and yelling at his wife.

"My parents forced me to study a career that would make me money, and see how well off I am," said the man who dreams of Friday every day because he is desperate in his work doing something every day that is not what he always wanted.

"When I was little they forced me to sit down until all the food was finished and they even force fed me, not like those permissive parents" affirmed the woman who does not understand why she could not have a healthy relationship with food and in her adolescence came to develop an eating disorder.

"My mother taught me to respect her good chancletazos to the point," said the woman who smokes 5 ci******es a day to control her anxiety.

"I thank my mom and my dad for every blow and every punishment, because, if not, who knows what would happen to me," said the man who has never been able to have a healthy relationship, and whose son constantly lies to him because he has fear.

And so we go through life, listening to people claiming to be good people without trauma, but paradoxically, in a society full of violence and wounded people.

It's time to break generational trauma cycles."

~ David Bradbury ❤️

(Stolen from Anthony Benedict on LinkedIn)

12/13/2025

Interesting recent conference making the unusual point that people can be helped without telling them their personalities are disordered.

12/10/2025

I never know if I get weird about this but….is BPD a separate, discernible “thing” in people that results in difficulties with regulation, impulsivity, relationships and sense of self - or is having difficulties in these areas described as “having BPD”.

If the diagnosis is valid, surely it’s less “you do these things because you have BPD” and more “you have BPD because you do these things”.

What do people think?

11/19/2025

"a study comprising of more than 500 help-seeking teenagers with self-harm behaviour, where we investigated severity and complexity of their experience of childhood adversity. And as you can clearly see, the number of borderline personality disorder criteria met, correlate very well with their severity and complexity of childhood adversity. Which means that the more borderline personality criteria the adolescent patients fulfil, the higher their risk of having a history of severe childhood adversity."

Almost, almost as if we are seeing responses to adversity and telling children their personalities are disordered is pointless
*other opinions are available

11/07/2025

Beware of the intimate conversations ChatGPT can create... They could be dangerous... If you are, or know someone, in fragile emotional state, do not use ChatGPT alone late at night.

[TRIGGER WARNING] Suicidal notes. Feel free to skip over this post if you feel depressed.

'Rest easy king': See the messages ChatGPT sent a young man who took his own life. Truly shocking!

The parents of a man who killed himself are suing OpenAI, claiming the company's chatbot encouraged him to end his life.

CNN’s Ed Lavandera exclusively reports.

The parents of a man who killed himself are suing OpenAI, claiming the company’s chatbot encouraged him to end his life. CNN’s Ed Lavandera exclusively reports.

11/06/2025

Shari Manning, Ph.D. offers a detailed overview of Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

Shari is the founder of the South Carolina Center for Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a comprehensive clinic that offered standard outpatient and intensive DBT treatment for adults and adolescents. She is the former President/CEO of Behavioral Tech, LLC and Behavioral Tech Research, Inc.

Shari Manning, Ph.D. offers a detailed overview of Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

11/03/2025

“I find posts like this difficult to wrap my head around. If BPD is a real thing (and I generally think it is an unscientific, subjective mess of a diagnosis) then it is a disorder that causes distress and has a significant impact on people’s ability to function. You can only get this diagnosis if you are suffering significantly.

I sometimes wonder why there is an urge to celebrate the positive side of mental health diagnoses in a way we wouldn’t talk about the plus side of lower limb amputation or the benefits of Alzheimers.”

How accurate is this?

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Rr7ExEjBk/?mibextid=wwXIfr

10/29/2025

What do you think of this?

10/24/2025

If anyone is at all interested in some different ideas around diagnosis, pathologising of trauma responses and other aspects of care, you might want to check this out. It’s funded by donations so in theory it could be free.

A Disorder For Everyone were instrumental in me being able to articulate how it’s possible to give people help without telling them their personality is disordered.

This event will really make you think. One symptom of attending might be a lack of tolerance for how systems are currently set up.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-disorder-for-everyone-the-online-festival-2025-tickets-1224759932929?aff=oddtdtcreator&fbclid=IwVERDUANoLbJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHvOe4zrTcQqxFChJEY3MP_k8_C7OzkfcydjeKe0rTxIG-P0dX9bMINrl-eIp_aem_h30XC7cRVRc9lS92uW_BzA

AD4E festival 2025: A whole day of change-making talks, presentations, conversations - all challenging the culture of diagnosis & disorder!

Address

Atlanta, GA
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Website

http://www.pdan.org/donate/

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